News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

Gisele left early this morning for her annual month in France. She is only taking 3 weeks of class this year, in the city of Tours. The other week will be spent traveling around the country.

Angela happens to be there at the same time, so Gisele will get to spend some time with her sister.

After 4 days of vacuuming up bees, I decided it was time to get serious.

I went to Lowe’s and bought a can of “Wasp and Hornet Spray”. They can’t advertise that it kills bees because they are protected, but they assured me it would work fine.

I found the most likely place for a hive — it’s a box-like extension to the wall where the dryer hose goes out. I drilled a 3/8″ hole through the drywall, stuck the spray nozzle in the hole, and sprayed for a few seconds. Then I quickly covered the hole with duct tape.

In a few seconds a gentle buzz turned into a loud hum that grew until it was a frightening roar. Thousands of bees must have been beating their wings, trying to find an enemy to attack. The vacuum cleaner was sucking at the outside entrance, and could barely keep up with the swarm as they flew outside. Many of them got past, and we could see them swarming around the porch light.

I sprayed poison into a few other nearby locations, and got more reactions in a couple of them. But it was clear that the first shot had been on target.

It took almost an hour before the roar died into a faint humming sound, and we went to bed.

This morning I sprayed a little more in, just testing if there were any live bees, but there was no reaction. So I cut a hole through the drywall into the box. Here’s what I saw through the hole:

I had reached in and broken a small piece of the honeycomb off before I took the picture, but most of it is intact here. The two bees on the comb are dead. Look carefully in the bottom and you can see lots more dead bees — about 2 inches thick. There were even a few larvae, though they’re hard to see in this picture.

Here’s what it looked like after I got it all out:

That’s a lot of comb to have been created in the few days they have been there, especially since I have been continually decimating their workers. I guess they had been as busy as bees.

And here’s a close-up:

There’s honey in that comb, but not a lot. I was sucking up most of the bees before they had a chance to get back in the hive, so they didn’t deliver much nectar. Even this wasn’t edible, because it was soaked with insecticide.

Finally, here’s a picture of the vacuum cleaner with dead bees.

The canister is 12 inches diameter, and the bees are 3 inches deep (with a little drywall dust on top of that where I cleaned up after cutting the hole). That’s about 340 cubic inches of bees. Assuming a 10 x 10 x 10 cube of 1000 bees is about 4 inches on a side, or 64 cubic inches, there must be around 1000*340/64 or over 5,000 bees. And that’s probably a low estimate.

Things are quiet in my house again. I feel a little bad about killing off so many bees, but I didn’t want to take any chances. The bee man who came on the previous call said that he doesn’t try to save the bees any more, so they would have died anyway. I guess the local beekeepers have plenty.

I am having problems with both birds and bees.

First, the birds: My peaches are ripening on the tree in my back yard, and there are lots of bites and nibbles. The worst part is that birds will eat them at a greener state than I will, so they spoil them before they are ripe enough for me.

I put up a net over the tree, but birds, with their excellent eyesight, can find any little hole in the net to get in. Unfortunately, once they get in under the net they aren’t nearly as good at finding the hole again to get out. So each morning I get up to find 2-3 birds stuck inside the net, sometimes with feathers tangled up in the mesh. I have to raise up one side of the net and then chase them out. At least 2-3 birds a day don’t eat as many peaches as however many were getting to them before, but I’m selfish and want them all to myself. Little by little I’ll find and patch those holes.

You remember a couple of weeks ago that I had bees in my garage. I called a bee expert who came and judged that they were just scouting and would probably move on. I vacuumed them up and he fixed a few holes, and that was that.

Yesterday we noticed hundreds of bees again, near where they had been before, but in an area untouched by the bee man. The stucco wall extends out slightly from the foundation, and there are little holes on the bottom, presumably to let any water out that may get in. The bees were going in and out of one of those holes as if they lived there. So I set up the vacuum cleaner hose an inch or so away from the bee-hole and just let it run. It was fascinating to sit and watch as bee after bee got too close and disappeared with a “thwip”, sometimes several in a second. It didn’t take long (an hour, maybe) until there were very few bees left buzzing around outside. The inside of the vacuum had hundreds–maybe a thousand bees.

The beauty of the vacuum method of bee removal is that when a bee is stressed or injured, it secretes a pheromone that excites other bees and incites them to attack. But with the vacuum, the bee and any pheromones are immediately removed from the area before they know anything is amiss. The other bees never realize that anything is wrong, though I’m sure eventually they are bothered by all their sisters gone missing. They hive must become a lonely place, like an old Twilight Zone episode where all the people suddenly disappear from the earth.